Preface

It's maker madness out there! SBCs, MCUs, FPGAs, PCBs, GPIOs, BeagleBone Black and Whites, Raspberry and Banana Pis, Odroids, Udoos, Arduinos, MCUduinos, TinyDuinos…

What does this impossible stew of acronyms and techno arcana mean? How do we make sense of it all, especially if all you want to do is make, invent, and design great whizzy things that go beep and bump and flash brightly or just grab hot data from temperature sensors? Most importantly, what to do if you are not a specialist, an engineer, or a hard-core software programmer?

This is a book precisely for those of you who want to know about BeagleBone Black but are afraid to ask, overwhelmed by its complexity, or underwhelmed by the dearth of understandable, timely information about this tiny but powerful microcomputer.

Why BeagleBone Black?

Although many of the competing small board computers (or SBCs) have their strengths, the virtues of BeagleBone Black are significant:

• Physical computing options: With its huge array of pins, you can wire up far more—be it sensors, motors, displays, or other hardware—than almost any other board on the market, even RPi.
• Out-of-the-box simplicity: As the BBB comes preloaded with a Linux OS (Debian), all you need to get going quickly is a mini USB cable to power up the board. There is no futzing around with installing software or adding peripherals to operate it.
• Internal drive: While other small board computers of this ilk can only run from an SD or microSD boot, BeagleBone Black comes with an internal solid-state drive, referred to as eMMC, to run the OS.
• Open source design: If you want to knock it off for a custom project, you can do it; all board designs and schematics are freely available.
• Real-time applications: Unlike other boards, such as Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black has a set of separate processors that can ensure that your code runs rock-solid and according to your expectations, which is an extremely unique feature for a computer at such a low price point.

As you begin tasting the various recipes throughout this book, perhaps a key difference worth keeping in mind is that the designers of BeagleBone Black regard the board as a prototyping platform to build embedded applications and products. An embedded computing device is typically part of a larger electronics system. This is quite unlike the design strategy of other boards, such as Raspberry Pi, which is a device specifically created as a full-blown desktop system and targeted at the grade school market.